In the second scale, we have 10 groups of 8 8 20 -dimensional variables.

Imagine a world where clinical trials need far fewer patients to achieve the same statistical power, thanks to the knowledge encoded in large language models (LLMs). We present a novel framework for hierarchical Bayesian modeling of adverse events in multi-center clinical trials, leveraging LLM-informed prior distributions. Unlike data augmentation approaches that generate synthetic data points, our methodology directly obtains parametric priors from the model. Our approach systematically elicits informative priors for hyperparameters in hierarchical Bayesian models using a pre-trained LLM, enabling the incorporation of external clinical expertise directly into Bayesian safety modeling. Through comprehensive temperature sensitivity analysis and rigorous cross-validation on real-world clinical trial data, we demonstrate that LLM-derived priors consistently improve predictive performance compared to traditional meta-analytical approaches. This methodology paves the way for more efficient and expert-informed clinical trial design, enabling substantial reductions in the number of patients required to achieve robust safety assessment and with the potential to transform drug safety monitoring and regulatory decision making.

Multimodal representation learning produces high-dimensional embeddings that align diverse modalities in a shared latent space. While this enables strong generalization, it also introduces scalability challenges, both in terms of storage and downstream processing. A key open problem is how to achieve semantic compression, reducing the memory footprint of multimodal embeddings while preserving their ability to represent shared semantic content across modalities. In this paper, we prove a strong connection between reducing the modality gap, which is the residual separation of embeddings from different modalities, and the feasibility of post-training semantic compression. When the gap is sufficiently reduced, embeddings from different modalities but expressing the same semantics share a common portion of the space. Therefore, their centroid is a faithful representation of such a semantic concept. This enables replacing multiple embeddings with a single centroid, yielding significant memory savings. We propose a novel approach for semantic compression grounded on the latter intuition, operating directly on pretrained encoders. We demonstrate its effectiveness across diverse large-scale multimodal downstream tasks. Our results highlight that modality alignment is a key enabler for semantic compression, showing that the proposed approach achieves significant compression without sacrificing performance.

In the second scale, we have 10 groups of 8 8 20 -dimensional variables.

The sampling temperature, a critical hyperparameter in large language models (LLMs), modifies the logits before the softmax layer, thereby reshaping the distribution of output tokens. Recent studies have challenged the Stochastic Parrots analogy by demonstrating that LLMs are capable of understanding semantics rather than merely memorizing data and that randomness, modulated by sampling temperature, plays a crucial role in model inference. In this study, we systematically evaluated the impact of temperature in the range of 0 to 2 on data sets designed to assess six different capabilities, conducting statistical analyses on open source models of three different sizes: small (1B--4B), medium (6B--13B), and large (40B--80B). Our findings reveal distinct skill-specific effects of temperature on model performance, highlighting the complexity of optimal temperature selection in practical applications. To address this challenge, we propose a BERT-based temperature selector that takes advantage of these observed effects to identify the optimal temperature for a given prompt. We demonstrate that this approach can significantly improve the performance of small and medium models in the SuperGLUE datasets. Furthermore, our study extends to FP16 precision inference, revealing that temperature effects are consistent with those observed in 4-bit quantized models. By evaluating temperature effects up to 4.0 in three quantized models, we find that the Mutation Temperature -- the point at which significant performance changes occur -- increases with model size.

Large language models (LLMs) typically employ greedy decoding or low-temperature sampling for reasoning tasks, reflecting a perceived trade-off between diversity and accuracy. We challenge this convention by introducing top-$n\sigma$, a novel sampling method that operates directly on pre-softmax logits by leveraging a statistical threshold. Our key insight is that logits naturally separate into a Gaussian-distributed noisy region and a distinct informative region, enabling efficient token filtering without complex probability manipulations. Unlike existing methods (e.g., top-$p$, min-$p$) that inadvertently include more noise tokens at higher temperatures, top-$n\sigma$ maintains a stable sampling space regardless of temperature scaling. We also provide a theoretical analysis of top-$n\sigma$ to better understand its behavior. The extensive experimental results across four reasoning-focused datasets demonstrate that our method not only outperforms existing sampling approaches but also surpasses greedy decoding, while maintaining consistent performance even at high temperatures.

Large Language Models (LLMs) generate longform text by successively sampling the next token based on the probability distribution of the token vocabulary at each decoding step. Current popular truncation sampling methods such as top-$p$ sampling, also known as nucleus sampling, often struggle to balance coherence and creativity in generating text, particularly when using higher temperatures. To address this issue, we propose min-$p$, a dynamic truncation sampling method, that establishes a minimum base percentage threshold for tokens, which the scales according to the probability of the top candidate token. Through experiments on several benchmarks, such as GPQA, GSM8K and AlpacaEval Creative Writing, we demonstrate that min-$p$ improves the coherence and quality of generated text even at high temperatures, while also facilitating more creative and diverse outputs compared to top-$p$ and other sampling methods. As of writing, min-$p$ has been adopted by multiple open-source LLM implementations, and have been independently assessed by members of the open-source LLM community, further validating its practical utility and potential.

Uncertainty quantification approaches have been more critical in large language models (LLMs), particularly high-risk applications requiring reliable outputs. However, traditional methods for uncertainty quantification, such as probabilistic models and ensemble techniques, face challenges when applied to the complex and high-dimensional nature of LLM-generated outputs. This study proposes a novel geometric approach to uncertainty quantification using convex hull analysis. The proposed method leverages the spatial properties of response embeddings to measure the dispersion and variability of model outputs. The prompts are categorized into three types, i.e., `easy', `moderate', and `confusing', to generate multiple responses using different LLMs at varying temperature settings. The responses are transformed into high-dimensional embeddings via a BERT model and subsequently projected into a two-dimensional space using Principal Component Analysis (PCA). The Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise (DBSCAN) algorithm is utilized to cluster the embeddings and compute the convex hull for each selected cluster. The experimental results indicate that the uncertainty of the model for LLMs depends on the prompt complexity, the model, and the temperature setting.

Large language models (LLMs) are applied to all sorts of creative tasks, and their outputs vary from beautiful, to peculiar, to pastiche, into plain plagiarism. The temperature parameter of an LLM regulates the amount of randomness, leading to more diverse outputs; therefore, it is often claimed to be the creativity parameter. Here, we investigate this claim using a narrative generation task with a predetermined fixed context, model and prompt. Specifically, we present an empirical analysis of the LLM output for different temperature values using four necessary conditions for creativity in narrative generation: novelty, typicality, cohesion, and coherence. We find that temperature is weakly correlated with novelty, and unsurprisingly, moderately correlated with incoherence, but there is no relationship with either cohesion or typicality. However, the influence of temperature on creativity is far more nuanced and weak than suggested by the "creativity parameter" claim; overall results suggest that the LLM generates slightly more novel outputs as temperatures get higher. Finally, we discuss ideas to allow more controlled LLM creativity, rather than relying on chance via changing the temperature parameter.

Generative neural samplers offer a complementary approach to Monte Carlo methods for problems in statistical physics and quantum field theory. This work tests the ability of generative neural samplers to estimate observables for real-world low-dimensional spin systems. It maps out how autoregressive models can sample configurations of a quantum Heisenberg chain via a classical approximation based on the Suzuki-Trotter transformation. We present results for energy, specific heat and susceptibility for the isotropic XXX and the anisotropic XY chain that are in good agreement with Monte Carlo results within the same approximation scheme.